Lightning
by Provocative Envy
Summary: ON HIATUS: I remembered the times he'd made me cry, warned me not to, the times our bare legs had entwined themselves in his bed sheets, and all the while I'd felt ashamed, disgusted, atrophied, in the aftermath. HG/DM.
1. Prologue

**Lightning**

_By: Provocative Envy_

OOO

**Author's Note**: You'd think as a college graduate, practically an adult, I'd stop doing this—but no. Insomnia strikes, and I find myself writing characters named Hermione and Draco. Due to the fact that I am now being _paid_ to write things that aren't fanfiction, I can't promise this will be updated with anything remotely resembling regularity; however, it will probably be more often than you'd think, since I don't believe in sleeping pills.

Anyway, I'm playing around with a new format in this story—the ludicrously short prologue, as it is, takes place _after_ the story itself; the story will just lead up to the ending, which will overlap with the prologue. So I'm not actually just going to post like half of a seemingly random page and then go with it. There is an order. I promise.

OOO

**PROLOGUE**

"I love you," he whispered, holding me tightly, acting like it wasn't a good-bye, pretending that its permanence was illusory—his breath was warm against my ear, his voice rough, and he was so close to me, so very close, I could hear every inflection, every distortion, in that simple, meaningless phrase.

_Keep breathing, just keep breathing,_ I reminded myself inwardly, awkwardly, all the while holding my breath, waiting, waiting, to see the rigid lines of his retreat.

"Please, look at me," he implored, his desperation not nearly as palpable in the ensuing silence as he would have liked it to be. "_Please_."

I remembered the times he'd made me cry, warned me not to, the times our bare legs had entwined themselves in his bed sheets, and all the while I'd felt ashamed, disgusted, atrophied, in the aftermath. There was no cure for false love, no truth to remedy the pain it inflicted; for every kiss he dropped on my waiting, expectant, bloodless lips, there were ten insults, ten _memories_ of insults, to remind me that his perfection was all a part of my imagination: my stupid, vivid, curiously incoherent imagination.

"Hermione." My name, finally, there it was, his last chance to make things right between us, his final attempt at both reconciliation and apology.

"Just go," I replied, my teeth gritted, my jaw clenched, every muscle and every joint I possessed locked in a furious battle with my natural inclination to move and my utterly unnatural desire to feel nothing, do nothing, let numbness overtake me to such a degree I couldn't feel his embrace any more than I could feel his kisses, his pleas, his love.

I wanted to feel nothing, absolutely nothing.

"You can't possibly be blaming me for this," he choked out, his hands, which had been so tightly gripping my elbows, dropping to his sides, his eyes flashing a brilliant silver before returning to the dismal gray-blue of my nightmares, my dreams, my everything—he was about to tell me his heart was breaking, like it would solve anything, and I was about to tell him that mine was already broken. And had been, ever since the night of that precious, pitiless rainstorm, the one that had simultaneously brought us together and torn us apart.

"There are a lot of possibilities you never considered, aren't there?" I said, my accusatory tone more effective than the words themselves. I glanced away, blinking back tears, wondering how I'd gone from prodigy to pathetic all in the space of a few weeks; I had had everything, _everything_.

OOO


	2. I

**Lightning**

_By: Provocative Envy_

OOO

**CHAPTER ONE**

_Six Weeks Earlier_

The moon was missing.

I stared at my calendar, at the bold-faced type in the upper-right hand side of the square labeled '29', and read it again: _Full Moon_. I glanced out my window, checking my watch and anxiously scanning the midnight-black horizon, searching for the only remaining tether to my old life—I was back in the bedroom of my childhood, kneeling on the pristine white carpet, gazing out my window, pretending I was still young enough to be excited by the presence of a full moon.

It was a ridiculous ritual, I knew it was, but seeing the clouds float so innocuously, so normally, in front of the moon that had, by some miracle, been there to say its farewells to me every August for six straight years—somehow, it sent a jolt through my body, my bloodstream, my nervous system. I felt an eerie, ethereal premonition drift through my open window, past my streaming white cotton curtains, stopping only to hover before my open, waiting eyes.

I shook my head, clearing my thoughts, and blinked.

The premonition had disappeared.

And even though I waited all night, for hours, the moon never came out.

Only the rain did.

It rained for days and days and days. My departure for school was marked by nothing but windshield wipers, Wellington boots, and frizzy hair. No one was quite sure where the weather had come from, but it became clear after three days, four days, five days, that it wasn't going away.

OOO

I was leaving the library, leaving Madam Pince to snuff out all the candles, when I saw him.

He was walking down a corridor, his footsteps oddly muffled and his hands jammed innocently in his pockets. I dismissed him with a perfunctory shrug of my shoulders, indifferent to his destination, assuming he was just returning to the Slytherin common room, when he made an abrupt turn into a little-known and even lesser-used staircase that led to the front doors of the castle. Intrigued, I started after him, reminding myself it was almost after curfew—but he was breaking that rule, too, wasn't he, and if he was up to something nefarious, wasn't it my responsibility as Head Girl to find him out?

I followed him down the grimy stairwell, looking around when I reached the bottom, only to see the back of his cloak trailing behind him as he sailed through the front doors. He was moving far too quickly for me to keep up at such a benign pace—he was running, it looked like, straight into the rainstorm.

Taking a deep breath, I ducked outside, trying to decipher through the sheets of metallic gray raindrops which direction he'd gone in; I saw a dim, ambiguous shadow directly ahead of me, and moved towards it, realizing only after I'd taken my first few steps that the shape was headed towards the Forbidden Forest. I stopped, appalled, squinting to make sure I wasn't mistaken, and gave an involuntary shudder when I saw the hulking mass of trees he disappeared into.

My ingrained fear of the Forest was legendary among my friends. I had listened to professors give endless lectures on the dangers that lurked in its terrifying depths, the secrets it kept and didn't give up without a fight—I was far more scared of the suspected dangers than I was of the known. The ignorance, what it meant, what it represented, caused me to shiver whenever I stepped too close to the edge of the grounds.

That shiver traveled up my spine as I watched him delve through the opening of the trees. My feet felt stuck to the ground, I was so astonished at his lack of hesitation, and I waited, certain he'd come running back out, whimpering, screaming, sweating—all the things I was sure I'd be doing if I was alone in that Pandora's box of peril.

Except none of that happened.

He didn't look back, and I didn't hear a sound, nothing except the rain slapping against the grass, sliding down my back, down my face.

I stood there, debating whether or not to follow him, weighing my curiosity against my fear.

And then, freezing and wet, I turned on my heel and walked back to the castle.

He really wasn't worth it.

OOO

"You know, it isn't good for your eyes to hold the book so close," he drawled the next afternoon, his trademark smirk in place. "Muggle habit, I suppose."

"What kind of habits do nasty bastards—much like yourself—adopt, then?" I replied through my teeth.

"Touching, really, how interested you sound," he said lazily, circling my library chair.

"Nauseating, really, how long this conversation's turning out to be," I shot back, irritated, jumpy.

"Now, now, Head Girls don't get sick in public, Granger."

"Normally, no. But talking to you is quite enough to change that fact, I'm afraid," I intoned prissily, beginning the arduous task of collecting my books.

"Afraid, are you? My, my, what a fascinating _habit_ that is," he remarked casually, an odd twist to his words causing my brain to freeze and my skin to prickle.

"Stop talking nonsense, would you? If you're not careful, you'll start sounding like your father," I replied breezily, slinging my bag over my shoulder and moving past him.

"Funny," he snarled, all pretenses of his nonchalance dissipating. "But you'd probably stop laughing if you knew the truth."

I furrowed my brow and stared at him.

"Since when do you tell the truth to anyone, let alone _me_?" I demanded incredulously.

"Since I saw you following me last night, Granger," he hissed, his eyes narrowed into angry gray-blue slits.

I swallowed.

"You were breaking a nearly insurmountable number of school rules last night, _Malfoy_," I shot back, matching his glare with one of my own. "It was my responsibility to make sure you weren't up to anything truly horrendous. As likely a possibility as that seemed."

"Ah, but you don't even _know_ what I was up to, do you, Granger? You backed off once you saw me enter the Forest. You got scared. Of what, though? The trees? The rain? Or the truth?"

I didn't blink, or move, or exhale—I held my breath, waiting for my mouth to say something clever of its own accord.

"Nothing quite so complicated, I assure you, Malfoy," I responded coldly, archly. "I simply had an aversion to the idea of catching pneumonia. It was raining, as you astutely pointed out."

"Of course," he allowed, somewhat sarcastically. "But whatever it was that you were so unduly frightened of, you still need a warning, Granger—don't ever presume to follow me, outdoors or anywhere else, ever again."

I laughed.

"Or what? You'll unleash the power of the Malfoy family name? Set Crabbe and Goyle on me? What?"

He just looked at me, deadly serious, and my mouth was suddenly very, very dry.

"You'll discover more truth than you could possibly ever handle, Granger. Indeed, so much that I doubt you'd be able to handle it. Isn't that what you're so afraid of?"

I watched his mouth form words as he spoke, watched the seemingly miraculous blend of lips and tongue and teeth and sound converge, only to create the condescending threat he was disguising so cryptically.

"Whatever metaphor you're failing so miserably at conveying with any degree of coherence, the fact remains that you can do nothing to me so long as it is my duty to uphold the rules of this school. You were breaking them, I was merely trying to ascertain as to why. It was raining, I was cold, and I went inside. There is no underlying meaning behind that. Stop pretending you have any secrets left," I snorted, crossing my arms over my chest.

He studied me, his lip curling.

"Only if you stop acting as if you don't have any."

OOO


	3. II

**Lightning**

_By: Provocative Envy_

OOO

**CHAPTER TWO**

_**Five Weeks Later**_

It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment I knew I'd been wrong, so wrong, to not believe him. His jaw was set at a furious angle, his eyes shut tight against the sight of me; he was angry at my disbelief, hurt by my hesitation. My mouth was open and words were waiting, impatiently, on the tip of my tongue, in the back of my throat, waiting waiting waiting for me to mean them, to speak them.

And yet I was frozen, stuck, a marble statue too fragile to be real, too empty to be beautiful.

I lifted a hand to my face, trailing my fingertips down the soft skin at my temple, feeling for a pulse, proof that I was still existing, taking breath after breath after breath—I was disconnected from time as he knew it, unable to differentiate between one second and the next, so uncertain of whether my realization was too early or too late, desperately necessary or utterly unwelcome. I wanted to blurt out everything that mattered, but had no idea if its significance was imaginary or not: I was lost.

"What are you so afraid of, that you can't even talk to me?" he asked, his complexion paler than normal, his eyes bloodshot.

"I'm not…That is to say, I can't be…I'm really not afraid," I stammered, my heart fluttering, my body aching to be enveloped by his own. I remembered, so vividly, what that felt like, that was the thing—

_"What are you so afraid of?" he'd whispered, smiling, stepping closer, confidence radiating from his gleaming gray eyes._

_"You," I replied honestly, knowing what would happen next, unable to stop it, unable to believe it, but craving it, just a little bit, more than a little bit._

_"Are you scared I'll hurt you?" he asked, still coming closer._

_"I'm scared of hurting myself," I responded, my voice quavering as his hands locked around my waist and his lips swooped towards mine, stopping just before we touched, the smallest fragment of space and time and oxygen separating us._

_"You should leave that up to me, I think," he said, his words floating into my mouth, and then he was kissing me, and it didn't matter, actually, that what he'd said was so unromantic, so ridiculous, so _him_—all that mattered was that we were standing there, together, and it felt like he'd never let go._

OOO


End file.
